Chapter 8
VI
My room. Door shut. Guys on the other side of it.
It’s the first time since the knock on the door that Mara and I have been alone, and it’s different now. Overwhelming, if I’m honest. I don’t know what she’s going to hit me with—judgment, compassion, acceptance? Her opinion of me matters. It shouldn’t, but it always has.
Mara sits on the edge of my bed. She hasn’t let go of the blanket from the safe house.
Her shoulders are curled forward, her hands are in her lap, and she’s looking around the room at the draped fabric on the walls, the low lighting, the small table with a pitcher of water, and a stack of folded clothes.
The boho luxe of it. A cage dressed up as a trendy bedroom.
I sit beside her. Close. Shoulders touching.
She cracks.
Not dramatically. There’s no sobbing, no collapse.
Just a long, shaky exhale that starts deep and works its way out, followed by her head dropping forward and her hands pressing the sides of her face.
She stays like that, breathing and trembling, letting the weight of whatever she’s gotten herself into to take root.
I don’t touch her. I don’t speak. I just sit there and wait. I don’t tell her how lucky she is to have me to help her adapt. Or the guys to protect her.
It’s a fucking miracle, when it comes down to it, that she’s starting out in the Rot like this. No one is ever this lucky. Of course, she knows none of this.
After a minute, she lifts her head, wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand, and exhales one more time, steadier now. “Sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
“I’m not going to fall apart on you.”
“I know. And if you did, that’s okay too.”
She almost smiles. Almost. It gets halfway to her mouth and stalls.
I ask where she slept. Doorways at first, then a burned-out office building on the Rot’s eastern edge, then wherever she could find that was dry and out of sight.
She slept sitting up most nights because lying flat left her too exposed.
It’s easier to get up to run from a sitting position rather than prone.
I ask what she ate. She shrugs. Whatever she could scavenge. Canned goods from buildings that hadn’t been fully stripped. Water from pipes she wasn’t sure were clean. Once, a Rotter at the edge tossed her half a sandwich without stopping or looking at her. She ate it so fast, she threw up.
I ask about the cold. She just shakes her head.
I don’t push.
“Your mom came looking for you,” I say.
Mara goes still. “Oh my God that’s right. One of the guys said that. What the hell?”
“It was a few weeks ago. She showed up at the Rot. Asked about you. I told her I didn’t know where you were. Which was true.”
Mara stares at me. “What did she say?”
“That she was worried. That she wanted you home.”
She considers that for a long time, long enough that I start to wonder if I should have waited to bring it up.
“Vi, Mom is the reason I stopped talking to you,” she says finally. “Back when your father’s stuff went public. She told me to stay away from you and your family. She said the Renners, both you and your dad, were poison. That getting involved would drag us down.”
“And you listened to her.”
She looks away, avoiding my gaze. “I was scared, Vi. She was all I had. So yeah. I listened.” She picks at the blanket. “Coming here was the first time I ever told her no.”
“Does she know where you are?”
“I left a note. Didn’t say where. Just that I was going and she should not come looking.”
“She came looking anyway.”
“That’s my mom.” Something crosses her face. Not quite a smile but more like the recognition of a pattern of family shit that always repeats. “She’ll be okay. She’s tough.”
“Mara…” I start to say.
“Listen. I’m not going back. I made my choice. Not that I could, anyway. You heard the guys.”
She chose me over her mother.
Then she turns, pulling one leg onto the bed so she’s facing me, the blanket still around her shoulders. I see the surface conversation ending and the real one beginning.
“Tell me… how you ended up with these guys,” she says.
I laugh lightly. I was waiting for this. I knew it would be top of her list.
“It’s an arrangement,” I say. “Only high-level Rotters can do it, at least as far as I know. They record it in some kind of weird ledger. I don’t know why they make it so formal, but it means I belong to them. Exclusively. No one else can claim me, reassign me, trade me. I’m protected.”
“Protected,” Mara repeats. Flat.
“Yeah. That’s a thing around here. You don’t want to be dangling out there, alone.”
“So you’re protected by three guys. Armen, Rogue, and who’s the serious one?”
“Sting. That would be Sting. And yes.”
“The ones who just told me I’m not allowed to leave.”
“Yes, Mara.”
“And this is permanent?” she says skeptically.
I shrug. “Yeah.”
“What does that actually mean? Day to day. What does your life look like?”
I answer slowly, not because I’m hiding things, not exactly, but because the truth is complicated and I’m not sure she’s going to understand.
I tell her about the work shifts. The sorting.
The routine that fills the hours and gives the days a shape.
I tell her about the hierarchy, the things she saw on the walk in, the deference, the body language.
I tell her that being with Armen, Sting, and Rogue puts me at the top of the bottom.
Still a Runt. Still the lowest tier. But untouchable within it.
“And them,” Mara says. “The three of them. What are they to you?”
The question is careful. Deliberately open. She’s giving me room to answer however I want. She’s going to judge me. I wish I didn’t care.
“It’s… complicated.”
She rolls her eyes. “Lame answer.”
“I know.” I pull my knees up, mirror her position. “They caught me. They claimed me. They decided I was worth protecting and they put their names next to mine in a book that can’t be erased. I didn’t choose any of that.”
“And?”
“And I’m still here. Look, I entered the Hunt to win the Favor, to learn about my dad, and I lost. I became a Runt.
The word’s a combination of rot and hunt, in case you didn’t figure that out.
I’m here permanently. I’m not fighting it anymore.
And some of that is survival and some of it is… ” I trail off. “Something else.”
Mara watches me. Her expression is unreadable, not quite judging, not quite pitying. But I know she thinks I’ve lost my fucking mind. She doesn’t understand. But she will, in time.
“Okay,” she says. Not agreement, just acknowledgment that she’s heard me and isn’t going to push further. Not tonight, anyway.
“You sleep with them, don’t you?”
Fuck. I knew this was coming. “I do.”
“And…”
I throw my hands up, defensive. Why am I defensive?
“It’s amazing Mara. I mean, you’ve seen them. They’re hot as hell. I never thought I’d like tough, alpha guys like that. But I do. And sometimes they wear masks. Scary ones. I like that, too.”
She crooks up the corner of her mouth, like she’s skeptical. Then she changes the subject to another conversation I knew was coming.
“Have you found anything about your dad?”
She says it carefully. The way you’d touch a bruise to see if it still hurts.
And even then the gentleness tells me everything I need to know, that her position on my father’s guilt hasn’t changed.
She still believes what she believed the last time we spoke about him, that my father, the mayor of Rothwell, was part of the machine that ground this city into rubble.
She’s not asking because she’s changed her mind, that I’m sure of. She’s asking because she cares about me and she knows it matters to me.
I go still.
I’m not angry. Not yet. But the anger is there.
It’s always there, saved inside me, ready to explode.
But I don’t let it surface because Mara just walked through a wasteland to find me.
She’s sitting on my bed with cracked lips and hollow cheeks, and I don’t want this to be the thing that breaks the first moment we’ve had together in a long time.
“Nothing yet about my dad, not really,” I say. “But there is supposedly some information.”
Her eyebrows rise and she nods but she doesn’t probe further. She doesn’t say any of the things she said last time, the horrible things that blew us apart.
What falls between us is different, like a wall built from what we each believe, the thing that separated us to begin with.
She falls asleep before I do. Her breathing evens out and within minutes, she’s out. She was running on fumes. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did.
I, however, am wide awake. It’s no wonder, with the weight of everything that happened in the last few hours.
I need to move. I need to not be in this room with my sleeping best friend and my spinning brain.
I slip out and find the corridor dim, the few bulbs that are lit casting long shadows. Most of the residential section is settled for the night. A few voices behind thin walls. The distant clank of someone in the communal area.
Rogue is at the bottom of the stairwell, sitting on the third step, legs stretched out, head back against the railing. He’s got a cup of something in his hand. He looks up when he hears me.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he says.
“Me neither.”
“Heavy night.”
“Yeah.”
He studies me with those easy eyes that miss nothing, even though they look like they’re barely paying attention. “You good?”
“Um, not sure.”
“What’s up?”
I shrug and say nothing.
He nods, taking the hint without pushing.
I walk down the stairs to stand in front of him. He looks up at me, waiting, reading my expression.
I straddle his lap, hungry for connection.
His hands come to my hips and his smile curves into that adorable half grin of his. “Okay,” he says. “This works too.”
I kiss him hard. Not romantic. Not slow. Mine is the kiss of a woman who has had too much conversation tonight and needs something that doesn’t require words. He responds instantly, his hands tightening on my hips, pulling me against him. He’s instantly hard beneath me.
His mouth moves to my neck, to the spot below my ear that makes me stop thinking. My hips roll against him while he groans.
“We’re in the stairwell, Vi,” he murmurs as if I didn’t know. “Anyone could come down here.”
“Don’t care.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
His hand slides up under my shirt, his palm flat on my ribs, then higher, cupping my breast, his thumb dragging across my nipple. I gasp into his mouth. His other hand slips into the back of my pants, gripping my ass, pressing me harder against him.
I reach between us, and get his belt open, stretching my hand around his cock. He sucks in a breath, his head dropping back against the railing. “Fuck,” he says.
“Let’s stand,” I say.
He lifts me with him, my legs wrapping around his waist. He turns and sets me on the railing, which is cold metal against my ass, and I don’t care. He yanks my pants down just enough to shake one leg free, and I pull him closer with my heels.
He pushes inside in one long, hard stroke.
It’s fast and hard, the stairwell echoing with sounds we’re not bothering to hide. Rogue fucks me with his hands gripping the railing on either side of me, his mouth on my neck, my fingers in his hair. It’s so goddamn hot, I forget for a moment everything that’s happened.
“So fucking good,” he says against my throat. “Every goddamn time.”
I come fast, biting my lip to keep from adding to the noise. He follows me a few seconds later, his grip on the railing white-knuckled, a low groan muffled against my shoulder.
We stay like that for a minute.
“Feeling better?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He pulls back, grins at me, and tucks himself away. Helps me off the railing, holds me steady when my legs wobble. “Get some sleep, Vi.”
“You too.” I pull my clothes straight and without looking back, climb the stairs, slipping back into my room. Mara hasn’t moved.
The spinning stops. My body goes loose—and I fall asleep with Rogue’s touch still on my skin.